Failure to Appear Across New York Regions

• In Event: Pretrial Decision-Making, Perceptions of Justice, and Criminal Legal Outcomes in the Light of Bail Policy Changes

Abstract

New York judges must consider an individual’s likelihood of failure-to-appear (FTA) when making release decisions. Some jurisdictions provide algorithmically-informed release recommendations to guide these decisions, but they are based on old data from a starkly different legal context and have not been validated since before the pandemic. Our report uses recent open-source court data to examine FTA rates in New York for cases arraigned in 2022. We conducted descriptive analyses by region, and within those regions by various factors, including charge characteristics, criminal history, case processing characteristics, and demographics. For released people, hierarchical logistic regressions were fit to explore the effect of each characteristic on the likelihood of an FTA while controlling for other factors. Next, the models were used to answer the counterfactual question: For people who had bail set or were remanded, how likely were they to have missed an appearance if they were instead released? We identified a range of predictors of FTA, including criminal history, charge, demographics, and region. Estimated FTA rates for held individuals are substantially higher than for released individuals. Preliminary findings highlight the importance of guiding judges’ release decisions with up-to-date, data-driven approaches that identify predictors of FTA.

Author

• Rene Ropac, Data Collaborative for Justice (DCJ) at John Jay College